Student-Led Discussion in the Classroom

In the "Tales of Gotham: NYC in Literature" course I taught this semester, I challenged my students to lead all the class discussions. The responsibility for leading rotated among small groups of 3 or 4 students who were encouraged to masterPrezito present their questions.

This ongoing assignment had several pedagogical goals:

To make my classroom student-centered

To use technology with purpose

To help students learn to ask great questions so they might discover excellent answers.

The idea of the student-centered classroom challenged many of my students. Initially, some resisted the idea of working in groups. Most students were unskilled at creating decent presentations. They are accustomed listening to a lecture and answering the instructor's questions, and so they had trouble asking good questions. By "asking," I mean both senses of the word: They could neither construct a good question nor did they knowhowto ask it well.

Overcoming Resistance to Group WorkPerhaps the most important factor in helping students overcome their resistance to group work was technology. Specifically, the presentation software they used allowed them to easily collaborate online. They did not have to find a time when they could all meet in the library, for example, to plan the discussion. This was a boon especially to commuter students and for students who work off campus. One student usually took charge of starting the Prezi (or GooglePresentation), and everyone added some questions to it. The end result was that students really enjoyed working in their groups: the technology connected them and the finished project was a group effort that they shared with the class. Learning how to use Prezi together also prepared them to use it in their individual projects, or to tackle other software that was new to them, such asTimeGliderandVuvox.

Using Technology with a PurposeAs we all know, most students use technology with a purpose every day, all day long. In general, from Facebook to Microsoft Word, they use these familiar tools always for the same purposes. In their other classes, my students are not often asked to explore other digital tools for academic purposes. Out of 80 students in my three classes, only one or two had even heard of Prezi. Most of them loved the way it allowed them to insert background images and add multimedia for their discussions and other projects they did for the class. It helped teach students how to create an argument through design.

One common problem in these presentations was that students placed too much text in a frame. When shown a frame with a few carefully chosen words and one that was loaded with wordy bullet points or long paragraphs of historical context, students could easily see which frame was the stronger one. By the end of the semester, most students demonstrated the ability to use only essential words in a frame. Needless to say, this exercise develops their critical thinking skills because they must decide which words best articulate their claims and which ones to leave out.

More challenging was the problem with the images they chose for illustrating their frames. The solution led students to become familiar with online image archives. For example, in a discussion on Joseph Mitchell's 1930s essay "Drunks," the group illustrated a question with a clip art image of a beer mug, circa 2012. We compared it to an image of a fancy hotel menu from theNew York Public Library's online collectionthat had been used to illustrate another group's discussion on Edith Wharton's short story, "After Holbein." Though it seems rather obvious why the latter image was much better than the former, many students expressed puzzlement and/or indifference. Through class discussion, they came to understand why a cartoon beer mug sheds little light on New York's early twentieth-century saloon culture. As a result, they became acquainted with the many fabulous digital archives of images, from the New York Public Library to theLibrary Congress, and their use of them helped make the course readings far more alive and vital to them than if they'd stuck to the first image to pop up on a Google image search.

Asking questionsAsking a good question was by far the most challenging part of the assignment. This, in fact, surprised me. But it quickly became to clear to me that my students are rarely asked to ask a question in class. They're much better at answering them, particularly if they're asked to give factual answers. Thus, many of the questions they asked were about facts: "Who is Peter Lick [a protagonist Mark Helprin'sWinter's Tale]?" "What is the weather like inWinter's Tale?" When these questions were posed, I sensed the rest of the class's boredom setting in--though few students understood why these questions failed to stimulate them.

After the first discussion, we critiqued the questions themselves. Comparing the more successful questions with others that fell flat, students learned the difference between a simple question and a critical one. They discovered that making a critical question can be as simple as changing the wording. Instead of asking "what is the weather like," ask "why is the winter important inWinter's Tale?" or "what role does snow play inWinter's Tale?" Questions that begin with "how" or "why," questions that engage wider issues and themes, questions that hone in on the significance of a single word or image that reappears throughout the book, questions that engage context--such as comparing the state of New York City in the 1970s, when Helprin wrote his novel, with the New York portrayed in the book--helped us dig out textual meaning and create lively discussion.

Delivery of the question posed yet another challenge: Often, students would ask the question and then, without taking a breath, proceed to answer it. The best method I've found for addressing this is to interrupt the student in a friendly way and ask them to hold off giving their answer. Some students drowned the class with a lot of context before asking their question. Best method: interrupt in a friendly way and ask student to just ask the question and supply the context later, if necessary.

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As a result of this assignment, my students brought to their final research projects strong skills at asking probing questions about their chosen subject, and I think this led them to finding better, deeper answers. Standing in front of the class within the safety of their group as they led a discussion, as well as other group presentations, gave them experience in public speaking and prepared them for individual presentations of their final projects at the end of the semester. They were confident, practiced, and provided some terrific answers to good questions they'd posed to themselves.

6 comments

This is such a useful, basic, practical, and really smart post about how the useful,basic, and practical issues (challenging students to ask a good question) make all the difference. So much theory, including pedagogical, operates one level up in abstraction that we never really get to these fundamentals. Many thanks for such a generous post.

Cathy, I must thank you, too, because your book and your talks have inspired me and given me so many ideas for teaching. Your work has led me to the conclusion that if I'm doing most of the talking in the classroom, there's not much teaching or learning going on.

I found your discussion of good and bad images to be extremely useful. This is a problem I've run into with presentations on American expressionist drama as well. Some people use the NYPL digital gallery and find great stills from early O'Neill plays and others find the first picture of Eugene O'Neill from Google Images. My question, though, is how did you bring up this discussion? I have gotten used to turning less-useful interpretations of textual passages into productive discussions, but I guess I don't have the experience doing that with presentation choices yet. Did you have something about quality of image choice in your rubric, or was it more of a spur of the moment conversation?

By the way, I'd love to take a look at your class syllabus. I'm an NYC literature scholar myself. If you have it up on a website/Google doc I'd happily share it with my cadre of NYC lit and culture folks on Twitter too, if you were so inclined. You can email me at sls0009 at Auburn dot Edu.

Thanks for your response, Sunny. My method for addressing less useful presentations was to talk about them after the presentation was over, either during that class or the next one. Basically, I gave students few guidelines about what kind of images to use--though I did direct them to various databases. Obviously, the student who chose the cartoon beer mug ignored that advice until after our conversation in class.

I'm too far outside of the city to do a solely NYC-themed class, but I did do a "City Cultures" course this summer. We used the Blackwell City Reader and the Faith Baldwin novel Skyscraper (which taught *beautifully*, a perfect Pop Culture text). I had students blog about the city and the class too. Their responses and the syllabus can be found here: http://aucitycultures.wordpress.com/

Do you know Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman's NYC Lit course at NYU? They blog about it pretty extensively. Might give you some good resources for the next time around. Thanks again!

How very interesting that this topic of teaching students to ask questions has came up here. I´m introducing my ESL students to the ideas from The Right Question Institute. The RQI has developed a technique to make this task more objective and simpler to adopt by the students through a series of steps. I´m still working on the first steps but I do believe students are coming along. Still initially, they wondered: "Aren´t YOU supposed to be asking all the questions?" JAJAJAJA! As much as we as teachers have to shift our position within the classroom walls, they too have some adjustment to do. Greetings!!